We’ve made a lot of changes recently, but for this blog post we’re going to focus on the one that will probably interest you most – our new, low-cost, high-performance, Elastic Containers:

New Product – Elastic Containers

Problem-free, one-size-fits-all infrastructure

We have just launched an entirely new product, a new type of cloud servers that we now offer alongside our traditional Virtual Machines. We’ve called them Elastic Containers. Firstly, “Elastic” because they fluidly and automatically expand and contract according to the amount of resources your software needs. With most hosting providers, this scaling is difficult. You are forced to select an fixed instance size like Small, Medium or Large, or to scale by adding and removing instances from a load balanced cluster. There is little fine-grained control and it requires significant effort to manually adjust sizing or to configure automatic scaling. With Elastic Containers, the size of your server will always match its load, and we only bill you for what it uses. This means that if you’re running 2GB of software on an 8GB instance, you only pay for 2GB. But if you suddenly need 8GB, because your site has a huge spike in traffic for example, you don’t need to do anything, you get an 8GB machine for as long as you need it.

Beyond Hypervisors

Secondly, the “Containers” part of the name is because they use a different technology from our hypervisor-controlled virtual machines. Instead, they use the very latest functionality in the Linux kernel to isolate containers. The technology behind them is based on Linux namespaces and CGroups, somewhat similar to LXC and the technology behind Docker.

New calculator, new prices

Using containers could save you a lot of money. Especially if your server load isn’t very consistent and you don’t want the hassle of manually resizing your servers to save money. To demonstrate this cost-saving, we’ve redesigned our calculator. If you go to our new Pricing page you’ll see you can now build a full pricing plan with multiple servers. You’ll also see a slider with two handles for our Elastic Containers. This is so that you can put a cap on your server’s expansion, setting a maximum burst limit so that you can’t scale up too large before you’re ready. The second slider handle is to set a subscription. As usual with ElasticHosts, we give you a 50% discount if you subscribe. This is because it gives us some idea about how much of our resources you’ll be using this month. Therefore, if your usage fluctuates a lot, you should set the subscription low, and the maximum burst quite high, this means you will only pay for what you’re using. If you know your server is going to need a fairly constant amount of resources then you should set your subscription to that level, so that you get the best deal, and the maximum burst to the maximum you’ll want your server to grow to.